After years of renting and bumming cars from people to go to town for shopping trips we finally found and bought a toad! (towed vehicle)

It follows us everywhere.

We couldn’t tow anything with Miss Lueffie and while the Queen’s Barge could tow it wasn’t really all that necessary; we could simply take the Barge to town. Now it’s a bit more difficult since we’re under a steel pole barn and it takes a 100-point turn to get in or out. Besides, an $8500 transmission and $3000 control box last September kinda put the damper on spending lots more money.

In any event, the stars converged and we found a lightweight easily-towable vehicle right sorta nearby in Houston, a Chevy Tracker. It’s a little roller skate with four wheel drive and Mom’s sewing machine has more horsepower. It’s a bit squirrelly over 60 mph (it wants to swap ends) and it accelerates in furlongs-per-fortnight but it’ll do fine. It reminds me of my old VW Bug.

I’d been looking for a Suzuki Sidekick / Geo Tracker / Chevy Tracker for a while and they’re thin on the ground; what I was finding was unsuitable models, too ragged out or hundreds of miles away. This one turned up nearby and two days later we adopted her.

We borrowed Tiffany’s pickup for the jaunt down to Houston. Now understand, we’re not city people. Our idea of a big city is Navasota, Texas or Cleveland, Georgia. Houston is another planet, like Atlanta. And it was very much like Atlanta except that other drivers indicated that we were #1 only a couple of times. And their horns worked ok.

All’s well that ends well and we ended up back at the ranch with a new member of the family. What’ll we name her, The Queen’s Dinghy? That sounds pretty good especially if you read it out loud a couple of times.